Starting at the End Point

In my previous newsletter, I did a quick overview on ways burned-out principals might reboot their leadership. Today I dig a little more into one of the ideas— rebranding— which, actually, isn’t about “branding” in the traditional sense—colors or signs or slick graphics— as much as it is about evaluating and re-committing to your school’s values and mission.

Listen. I get it. “Values and Mission.” Ugh, right? When I hear the words, “mission statement,” I kind of… tune out. It feels like nonsense because, in my experience, those things are rarely tied to any action.

When I was a young teacher, I was hired at a brand new school. Brand new. The principal asked me to sit on a committee to help establish our school’s mission statement. Sure, I said. “That sounds fun!” It wasn’t. We had, like, ten meetings. There were large tables, colored pens, easels with chart paper, and hundreds of Post-its. There were dictionaries and thesaurus. There were strong feelings and stubborn pontifications. We spent hours on a single sentence. The wordsmithing was exhausting. Did we mean “and” or “also”? Should we say “believe” or “expect”? In the end, though, we came up with a nice neat paragraph that everyone sorta-kinda liked. It was about excellence and commitment to students.

We got a beautiful banner made. We put the paragraph on the website. We moved on. It was fine.

But we didn’t really revisit it. It didn’t come part of our foundation.

It was a boxed checked, not a goal set. The two are quite different.

So that wasn’t great. Nor was it great, though, when years later, I worked in a school that hadn’t had a vision or mission statement for a decade— maybe more. The problem came when there was a need to remind someone— a teacher, a parent, a department, a room full of staff or community— what guided our thinking every day when we got to work. It wasn’t about a banner; it was about a mindset. It was about knowing what our ultimate outcome—the end point— should be. So we did it. We got a team together and figured out what we wanted our mission to be. We promised not to angst for hours about it; we got input from community members, staff members, students, and our district leaders. We landed quickly and adopted the statement and then we kept talking about it. We put it on letterhead; we opened meetings with it; we used it as the banner on our website; we hashtagged it like crazy on social media pages. In conversation, we framed its essential message into a question, as in, “Is this [new initiative] [decision] [plan] aligned with our statement?” We even wrote a song.

We did it by starting at the end. What do we want students to say about our school when they leave us?

There are consultants and companies who can help you do this, but if you don’t have the money(or desire) to hire this job out, you can absolutely do it yourself. How? Well…

Think about this.

Get a group together and ask them how they’d like to write a vision or articulate a mission. Let them develop the plan.

Ask questions, like What do we want students to say about our school when they leave? Then go into questions like Who have we been? Who are we now? How has our school evolved? What are some key areas that drive our work?  

Make lists of things you do and why they are important. You might include student behaviors, discipline, operational activities; academics, curriculum, growth, achievement; English language instruction, special education, differentiation, MTSS, personalization, gifted education, twice exceptional students, professional development, assessment, data. Any of those things, or none of those things, or more things. Whatever is on your list, it will need to be wrass’led into a reasonable and relevant pathway of action.

Get it into a neat, manageable phrase, sentence, or paragraph.

Decide how you will communicate your vision.

Share it, say it, revisit it. Yeah, sure, you should put it on a banner and a T-shirt. You should also repeat it again and again. Make sure people know what it is and why it matters. “Remember, we’re working to make sure Every Student Ready,” you might say. Or, “Does this align with Students First?” Or whatever your phrase is.

In future newsletters, I’ll talk about this more. The overall point, though: We don’t want to simply write a mission statement (or, god forbid, use Gemini or ChatGPT to write one for us) simply so we can say we have one. Instead, we should go back and think about what we actually want to get done, and what students should experience when they attend our school.

Let’s Stay Curious—

Jen